First Night
In response to my two questions, both Wild Cat and Manager Yan Er said they were unaware of the matter, and the matter was once again left with a half-question mark.
But at least I know for sure that the initial change was man-made. I accept that, but it is a little hard to understand:
"Don't you want to check with Gao Liu first? You attacked her without testing her. Isn't the trust between you siblings too fragile?"
Wildcat said that although Gao Liu was the deputy captain, many of the team's rules were actually set by Gao Liu. Gao Liu had repeatedly emphasized that if an abnormal situation was discovered, the source of danger should be subdued first, and he could not violate this.
When he said this, his face was still suppressed and tense, and there was a bit of unconscious pride in his words when he mentioned Gao Liu, which completely failed to show his wariness and indifference towards Gao Liu just now.
I shook my head in my heart, thinking that the way this brother and sister get along is something that a mortal like me cannot understand for the time being. If my family did this, I would have been kicked out of the household registration book and become adopted.
The topic returned to the booklet.
This seemingly inexplicable resident handbook is now related to Xu You, Zhou Tingmao, and Gao Liu, and is inextricably linked to the pit incident.
I turned it over and over and looked at it carefully, but couldn't make out anything. However, the shopkeeper Yan Er came over to take a look with his eyes narrowed and exclaimed.
I was skeptical, thinking that this expert in corruption might have exceptional eyesight, so I gave him most of the booklet horizontally.
He waved his hand and pointed directly to the colorful center seam of the manual.
I looked at it for a long time and finally made out some vague traces. It seemed that a piece of white paper with a much lighter color was placed on the spine of the book.
There were still a lot of small tools, so we sat down on the ground and picked up tweezers, pliers and dental floss while waiting for news from Gao Liufang Mastiff and the others.
I must say that during this process, I kept having the vague thought that it was not very comfortable to stay outside the camp, and I wanted to just find a tent and sneak in to rest.
"No one else can recognize us anyway, and this camp originally belonged to us."
This natural thought flashed through my mind, and I became alert. I knew that if I relaxed and obeyed, it might not be a good thing. In the end, I would inevitably get used to it and stay in this camp.
The manual was very thin, and the paper stapled inside was even thinner. We opened it very carefully for a long time, and before we knew it, ten minutes had passed.
I have to admit that there were two or three minutes during which Wild Cat and I were basically causing trouble for the seemingly leisurely Manager Yan Er out of our impatience.
Finally, I took out the booklet completely and took out the lighter-colored page. When unfolded, it was the size of an A4 paper. I looked at the contents and found that it was a family information registration form.
The content of the registration form was very strange, including the age, gender, place of origin, two direct relatives of the family, brothers and sisters within three generations, and various aliases, nicknames, former names and even childhood names used by the applicant.
Among them, the name column was filled in and then completely blacked out with a grid, and the former name was also crossed out with several horizontal lines.
There was another long line below, densely filled with what seemed to be other people's nicknames. Someone was picking out the names with a pen, circling a few of them, drawing a line next to the person's name, and then forcefully crossing them out.
Then a few titles that didn't look like proper names were hastily written next to the original family information column of the person filling out the form, still with lines and crosses.
It can be seen that the handwriting on the entire table is becoming more and more impatient and sloppy, and the paper is almost torn when drawing connecting lines and red crosses.
The content of the entire registration form is incomprehensible, and we can only roughly guess that someone seems to be trying to forcibly establish some kind of connection between the person filling out the form and someone else.
The more anxious you are, the more you will be blinded by one thing. I will ask a few other guys to come and take a look and tell us what your first impression is, no matter how wild and imaginative it is.
There was a guy who had been silent at the side. He listened to the others talking for a long time before hesitantly asking, "Find the same?"
I was stunned and immediately went back to look at the form again and asked him what he said.
He pointed at the two names that were connected and said uncertainly that in their northern Fujian dialect, the name of the person filling in the name was similar to Jiarong or Jiayao, and it was a bit like a relative or fellow clan member with the connected name below.
Seeing that I was deep in thought, the guy quickly said that what he said was far-fetched.
This may sound far-fetched, but I find it quite interesting. The whole table is like an effort to find a cheap relative among the names.
I went back to the torn booklet and looked at the part with the illustrations.
The illustration is to illustrate how to seek treatment with the company and care of family members if an accidental injury occurs.
The matchstick-head figures all look the same with long arms and legs, and their clothes are painted the same color with a marker, making the picture look a bit dirty.
Maybe it’s because we had a psychological preset in mind, but when we three look at it now, we feel that the little people being supported in the picture are looking up, as if they are looking at something high in the sky.
The lines of the stick figures representing the family members are very simple and unreasonable. Most of them are blocking the injured villain and looking at him, as if they are using themselves to shield him, or trying to wrap him up.
Each of the "family members" has their faces tilted to one side, and some are half-covered, with only a tiny red arc showing to represent their mouths.
It was the first time I saw such a greedy and evil grin on such a childish sketch, and I felt as if bugs were crawling all over my body.
Looking at the whole picture again and linking it to the family information registration form, the meaning should be roughly the same:
The last time the team came to explore the pit, they encountered some kind of danger. But it seems that the "family" can temporarily protect them, but also covet them and cause unknown dangers.
This narrative logic is very familiar to me. In my opinion, the rules of the "sentry booth" contain similar "guards/security".
It’s just that here there seems to be more emphasis on the meaning of family, and the need for deeper and more intimate connections between people.
But it's the same thing, not too hard to understand.
I thought to myself, this is impossible, is that all the information? I looked at the shopkeeper Yan Er again, hoping that he would reveal something else to me out of thin air.
He smiled bitterly, thought for a long time, and took out an MP4 from the lining of his clothes.
"Grandpa, I converted the format of the tape you asked me to burn. How about we draw inferences from one instance to another?"
I was staring at the pile of manuals in worry. When I heard him talking about the tape Zhou Tingmao left for me, I couldn't help but slap my swollen forehead hard, thinking that I was really foolish to look for a job while I still had one.
I really have been feeling chest tightness and shortness of breath since I got out of bed, and my reactions have been much slower, as if I was always lacking oxygen.
But the night breeze brought a hint of coolness to my face, making it quite comfortable even in this kind of place. For a moment, it seemed a bit unreasonable to blame the environment.
As he was patting his forehead to try to wake himself up, his nose felt hot and two more drops of hot liquid came out.
This made Yan Er, the wild cat, a little nervous and asked me what was wrong. I shook my head and thought I was not made of cellophane, so I said I should listen quickly.
Before I pressed the play button on the recording, another guy looked at the scattered manuals for a long time and asked me in confusion:
"Counselor, what do you think of this?"
I looked over and asked, "What?" Then I touched one of the pages he was pointing at and it seemed a little bumpy.
How should I put it? It feels like someone took this manual, opened one of the pages and wanted to record something, but unfortunately the ink was gone and only a few scratches were left.
But the scratch was very slight, and the guy who found it also noticed that the reflection was a little uneven under the overhead light. If you really want to say what's specific, the scratch itself is incomplete and it's really hard to see.
We discussed it for a long time, starting with almost nonsense, and in the end we could only identify a few of the strokes, which seemed to be counting the correct characters.
This is all the information I can find in the manual, and I still have no clue.
I couldn't help feeling a little frustrated, but I still sat down and listened to the recording.
After listening to it, we found that the amount of information was very huge. We only listened for less than five minutes before we all looked at our watches to confirm the time. Wildcat even communicated directly with Gao Liu, asking her to come back quickly if she didn't get any results.
There is a lot of content in the recording, all of which are intermittent conversations, and occasionally some very long background sounds. They were probably specially recorded by the previous exploration team during the few nights they spent here.
In order to avoid redundant elaboration, I will first summarize what happened from the first night to the next day.
First of all, this team probably had one forehand and two assistants. No one mentioned the forehand's name directly, but just referred to him as "Yan Tou'er". The two assistants were Xu You, who was 37 years old at the time, and Zhou Tingmao, a pure civilian teenager.
At the beginning of the recording, they seemed to have just experienced a chaotic attack, but because they were all elite, there were basically no casualties, and most of them were only slightly injured.
At that time, they gathered and took roll call, and the entire team consisted of twenty-two people.
Twenty-two. When I heard this number, my stomach twitched. The fleet also had this number. I don't know if the Zhang family was obsessed with this number, or if Xu You himself couldn't forget it. Anyway, it sounded very ominous.
Secondly, when reporting their names one by one, since most of them were Zhang family's employees, three out of the five were relatives, and two were brothers-in-law.
After this count, these guys who didn't care much about life and death couldn't help but start talking nonsense, saying that the only few casualties just now seemed to be brothers who joined from outside, which really sounded like they were unlucky.
But of course they didn't take such casual remarks to heart at the time. They just set up camp on the spot and prepared to rest and explore the next day.
A night passed, everything was calm and there were no attacks. Listening to the routine records in the recordings, it seemed that the things that attacked them previously had been cleaned up by them.
However, the next day, when everyone was calling the roll, they discovered that one person was missing.
Although this person also has the surname Zhang, he is a very distant relative. He has a withdrawn personality and doesn't like to interact with people.
So after clicking around and finding that the name was empty, the others around him took a while to react before they connected his formal name with the nicknames they usually gave him, and then they remembered his face.
The team itself has very strict discipline. It is unimaginable for everyone that someone would leave the team without anyone noticing and disappear.
In particular, the team leader Yantou checked it personally and found that all the things belonging to this person were there, and his personal belongings were placed randomly. He was in a state of being about to rest, and no food or water was taken away from the team.
At that time, they came to a conclusion that this person had most likely disappeared before everyone fell asleep. But during that period, the team had just set up camp not long after the attack, and many people were still bandaging their wounds with lights on before going to bed, and they were all in the most alert and active state.
If a living person was taken away by someone, then this person's ability to enter an empty space as if it were no one's there would be enough to wear down the entire team bit by bit. This kind of person is unlikely to exist.
But if it was the monster that attacked them before, it seemed too weak, and there was no trace of anything around.
Since they couldn't come to a conclusion for the time being, they arranged a small team to go out and search, while the others continued to be busy with the arrangement of the camp, preparing to conduct a formal exploration of the bottom of the pit later.
Two hours later, the fellow who fetched water found the team that went out to look for people. They all fell to the ground with their eyes closed, pulling each other's sleeves. In addition to this survivor, three more people disappeared.
Hearing this, I temporarily stopped the recording, guessing that this was the beginning of the stickman drawing in the manual. They must have experienced similar incidents several times before concluding that they needed a family-like relationship to avoid this seemingly irresistible disappearance.
The recording in the middle jumped for a long time, directly going to the third or fourth night.
What I didn't expect was that this time, they were voting and counting the votes in the recording.
The atmosphere during the entire vote counting process was extremely gloomy. Every time a name was called out, the voices of the guys who responded were very unnatural.
The leader Yan Tou'er's voice said coldly inside: "No, there is still one missing."
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